Restraining Government in America and Around the World

Greek Chutzpah

There’s an old joke that if you owe a bank $10,000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem. The Greek government certainly seems to have that attitude. Short-sighted and corrupt politicians in Athens have spent their nation into a fiscal ditch and they now want to mooch from both the IMF and other European nations (especially Germany). The German Prime Minister (if only for political reasons) is talking tough, saying that Greece should do more to reduce subsidies and handouts. Why should Germans work until age 67, after all, so Greeks can enjoy overpaid government jobs and retire at age 61? So what is the response from the Greeks? Amazingly, one of the politicians had the gall to say his nation “cannot accept” further wage cuts. Here’s an excerpt from the Daily Telegraph:

It is far from clear whether Athens will agree to further austerity as strikes hit the country day after day. Andreas Loverdos, Greece’s labour minister, said the EU-IMF team wants further wages cuts. “We cannot accept that.” Greece knows it can opt for default at any time, setting off an EMU-wide crisis and bringing down Europe’s banks. It also knows that key figures in the Bundestag favour debt restructuring. “Those who chased high yield by purchasing Greek debt must share the costs,“ said Volker Wissing, chair of Bundestag’s finance committee. Leo Dautzenberg from the Christian Democrats said banks should prepare for a `haircut’ of up to 50pc. The ECB, Brussels, and the IMF have been fighting feverishly to head off such a move, fearing a financial chain-reaction.

If the Germans have any brains and pride, they will tell the Greeks to go jump in a lake (other phrases come to mind, but this is a family-oriented blog). And if this means that German banks take a loss on their holdings of Greek government debt, there’s a silver lining to that dark cloud since it is time for financial institutions to realize that they should not be lending so much money to corrupt and wasteful governments.

It will become increasingly difficult for a group of nations who practice Social Democracy and Welfare inside their borders, to deny it at the intra-European level. Productive Europeans will be forced to subsidize the less productive ones. That is what the Germans effectively signed up to when they agreed to European economic and political integration – alas only now they are finally coming to grips with the reality of the matter.

With Brussels bureaucrats frantically working to establish new mechanisms for permanent intra-European North-South wealth transfer, time is on Greece’s side. As the Brussels bureaucrats become the de-facto gatekeepers of this perpetual wealth transfer, their importance, power, compensation and benefits will increase. Hence their motivation.